The number of Alabama elementary and middle school students scoring below proficient dropped in most subjects on the Alabama Comprehensive Assessment of Progress test, according to data released by the Alabama State Department of Education.
The test results for the 2024-25 school year are split between four levels where level three and four are considered proficient. State Superintendent Eric Mackey said the number of students scoring below those levels dropped for every subject area except eighth-grade math.
“Across the board in English language arts … we saw a reduction in level one and level two. Those are students below proficiency in pretty much every grade across the board,” Mackey told reporters after the State Board of Education meeting. “What it means is all those students are moving to proficiency levels. I was very excited to see that in level one, our lowest performance level, in every grade we saw fewer students than 2024.”
Public school students from second to eighth grade took the test last year. The scores released Tuesday reflect overall statewide performance. District and school-level data will be available in August.
The English language arts test includes reading, in which second and third graders improved, but also reading comprehension and grammar, Mackey said.
The only stagnant data in proficiency was in seventh grade math and fourth grade science. In 2024, 38% of seventh graders scored in level one, which improved to 32% this year. However, Mackey said that not enough students were moving from level two to level three. The same percentage of seventh graders scored in level two in 2024 as there were in level one, but only 44% of students were in level two this year. Levels three and four were the same over the two years. For the fourth grade science scores, there were increases and decreases in each level, which evened out to 43% of fourth graders being proficient in science.
“We saw essentially the same thing in math with one little glitch in seventh grade that we’re still kind of worried about,” he said. “We’re still looking at that. It appears to be an alignment in curriculum issue because we see a rebound a little bit in eighth grade and high school.”
About 24% of seventh graders were proficient in math this year, largely unchanged from the 2023-24 school year. Eighth graders were 25% proficient in math, a 3% improvement over 2023-24, according to the data.
Where 60% of second graders are proficient in English language arts, 46% are proficient in math. Across all three subject areas, proficiency starts to drop in the sixth grade.
Seventh and eighth grade students’ scores in math are lower than the other grades, which Mackey said is due in part to these students opting out of the required curriculum to take a higher level math.
“Seventh and eighth grade math has always been an anomaly,” he said. “I’m worried about this, but it’s not my greatest worry because middle school math is complex for the whole country right now. There’s a serious drop for a lot of reasons, and part of it is screen time.”
But Mackey said he believes students are in a good spot.
“This means we are pushing students to higher achievement across the state in every grade,” Mackey said.
PROFICIENT IN ENGLISH
According to data from the department, Alabama schools had over 50,000 students whose first language is not English. Of those, 2,670 (5.29%) tested in 2025 as proficient in the English language, an increase of about 0.7% over the 2023-24 school year. Mackey predicted that there would be 55,000 English language learner students by next years’ data release.
“We have to remember that not all are coming to us at first grade, they’re coming to us all from all grades,” Alabama State Board of Education President Pro Tempore Kelly Mooney said.
If a student scores well enough on the test, they no longer require support service, but Mackey said the support is still available to them
“It takes most students way more than one or two years to read and write English proficiently to exit,” he said. “A lot of them are coming to us and they have had no or almost no formal schooling where they came from.”
HIGH SCHOOL TESTING
Mackey also said the state average on the ACT, the standardized test for college admissions, was 17.3 in 2024-25, down slightly from the 17.4 in 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years. The highest possible score on the ACT is a 36.
Currently the state administers the ACT test with the writing section to all 11th graders. Mackey said requiring it for all students discourages those not planning to go to college from performing well on the ACT test.
“If a student is not going to college and their ACT scores aren’t going to count on their A through F report card, they may not go in there and try very hard,” Mackey said. ” And this, this number may continue to decline no matter what we do, because it’s not an accurate description of our college bound students.”
Mackey suggested that the board revisit how high schoolers are tested, because the current model does not accurately reflect high schoolers, especially those intending to go to college.
“For accountability, we might move to a different kind of test,” Mackey said.
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